Gone to the Dogs

by Susan Conant

  But he eventually ushered out a woman and her limping collie, raised an arm toward me, and held open a swinging door. Glancing at the file folder Lorraine had given him, he said, “You can bring Rowdy in now.”

  Once we were finally in the exam room, I was, of course, eager to get the ear mite medicine and be gone. “He’s got ear mites,” I told Lee. “He keeps shaking his head, and the ear’s got some glop.”

  Lee rested his back against one of the Formica counters, folded his arms, and began to question me. When did I first notice the problem? When had I last observed the ear? Had I looked in the other ear? Had Rowdy had any previous ear infections? Then he slowly opened Rowdy’s chart and spent at least ten minutes memorizing its contents.

  “Steve checked his ears the other day,” I said. “They were fine then.”

  He nodded and kept reading the chart. At last, he said, “Well, let’s take a look.”

  He reached for an otoscope, then put a hand into one of the pockets of his white coat and pulled out a brown leather muzzle.

  “You don’t need to muzzle him,” I said. “He likes being here. I’ll just hold him. He won’t give you a hard time.”

  But Miner didn’t put the muzzle away. “Just to be on the safe side,” he said as he slipped it on Rowdy and buckled it. I didn’t object. A muzzle isn’t painful, Rowdy was undeniably a big dog, and Lee didn’t know him. Right after I’d adopted Rowdy, the first time I gave him a bath, I muzzled him, too. But Rowdy loved veterinarians as much as he hated water. My lovely, gentle dog stared at me with puzzled eyes, as if to ask what he’d done wrong. I told him he was good boy, then knelt beside him, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, my hands ready to keep his head still while Lee looked in his ears. After patting the top of Rowdy’s head a couple of times, Lee finally inserted the instrument and peered into Rowdy’s right ear.

  “Mites,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” he told me.

  Then he spent a long time fiddling around. He took a sample from the ear, disappeared into the back of the clinic, reappeared, checked the other ear, and cleaned out some waxy glop. Steve, I should mention, doesn’t exactly rush through anything. He is careful and thorough. Even so, he can diagnose and treat an ear infection in less than thirty minutes, especially when he’s an hour behind schedule and the waiting room’s packed. Furthermore, no matter how busy he is, he always takes time to visit with the animals and the owners. I tried to chat with Lee, but he said almost nothing. When I asked him about Oscar Patterson, he said we’d talk about it another time, if I didn’t mind. He addressed hardly a word to Rowdy. Just as I’d concluded that Steve had hired an associate who’d be a liability to the practice, I got a surprise.

  “No sign of mites,” said Lee.

  I pride myself on my diagnostic skills. “Are you sure?” I asked. Steve doesn’t love that kind of question, at least from me.

  Lee was nice about it. He nodded. Then, after he’d given me a long explanation and an unnecessary lesson on how to clean a dog’s ears and apply Panolog ointment, he removed the muzzle. Rowdy shook his head, then his whole body, and made for the door to the waiting room. We were both glad to leave. It’s stupid to take your dog to a vet and announce a diagnosis. I shouldn’t have done it. But what had Rowdy done except be himself, a big dog?

  “So, I felt like a jerk, and I deserved it,” I told Hope late that same afternoon as we sat at my kitchen table drinking tea. She’d stopped in to return my copy of the Ian Dunbar tape. You know the one? Sirius Puppy Training. You know who Ian Dunbar is, don’t you? The Dr. Spock of dogs, or this being Cambridge, maybe the T. Berry Brazelton. “But he did take forever. Honestly, I was there at least an hour and a half. And I wish I hadn’t let him muzzle Rowdy. I was too nice about it. There wasn’t a chance in a million that Rowdy’d bite him. I should’ve said no, but I didn’t do anything. I just watched him clamp that muzzle on.”

  “A lot of them do that,” Hope said. “They just do it routinely with big dogs.”

  Then I heard Rita tapping at the kitchen door. She often stops in on her way upstairs. If she’s just spent the day listening to her patients tell her how they’re feeling, she comes in to tell me how she’s feeling. Then she asks me how I’m feeling, and—at least according to Rita—I talk about my dogs. Sometimes, though, we just hang out. Rita wears jewelry, and not the ubiquitous Cambridge handmade pierced-ear earrings, either, but chunky necklaces, bracelets, rings, and even pins, if that’s what they’re still called. Brooches? Anyway, Rita raps quickly and sharply with whatever ring she happens to be wearing. That day, it was a big silver one with an electric-blue stone that matched her suit. Rita always dresses like that. Cambridge people often assume that she lives in New York City because she does things that have nothing to do with the life of the mind. She is the only woman in Cambridge who keeps her hair looking as if she’d just left the salon. The normal thing to do here is to sprint home from the hairdresser to get shampooed before anyone sees you.

  Dog people, of course, have no prejudice against the application of gels, conditioners, and mousses to expensively scissored hair, but they never notice it on mere people. If Rita’s head had been shaved, or even missing, Hope would still have got down on the floor and spoken gently to Groucho, Rita’s dachshund, before wiping her hand on her jeans and offering it to Rita as I introduced them. They’d met once before, but I was sure that Hope had forgotten. Rita hadn’t had a dog with her at the time, and, from Hope’s viewpoint, a person without a dog is as distinctive and memorable as the average refrigerator.

  “What a sweet old boy,” Hope told Rita as I was locking Rowdy and Kimi in my bedroom. “How old is he?”

  “Older than I want to remember,” Rita said. “It shows, huh? I don’t like to think about it.”

  Hope told Rita the same lies I’d been telling her for the past few months: Groucho probably still had a few good years. His eyes looked alert. He was moving around easily enough. Like Rita, I didn’t want to think about it. Groucho didn’t really even walk anymore. He tottered. Sometimes he leaned against whatever wall he stumbled into. Rita had to carry him up and down the stairs to her apartment, which is on the second floor, directly above mine. His eyesight, hearing, and appetite were just about gone, it seemed to me, but I kept agreeing with Rita’s claims that he had seen a cat out the window, heard Rowdy howl, or enjoyed his prescription canned dog food. The one truth Hope told Rita was that Groucho was, in fact, a sweet old boy.

  “I feel so ambivalent about leaving him,” Rita said. As usual, he was in her lap, but I’m not sure he knew where he was or even that he was. “I’m due to go away over Christmas. I made plans a while ago, and I thought I’d take him with me, but I can’t see it now. I don’t think he could handle it.”

  “By air?” Hope asked.

  “Yes,” said Rita, looking down at Groucho and stroking the white fur around his lips.

  Hope shook her head in agreement. “And in winter, if the temperature’s below ten degrees, they won’t take him. Unless he could travel with you? Not with the baggage?”

  “I tried that,” Rita said, “but no go. They won’t let him. He’s small, but his carrier’s not that small, because I don’t want him all cramped up.”

  “Rita,” I said, “you know I’d keep him here if I could.”

  “Of course,” she said and added, to Hope, “Holly’s offered to go up and feed him and take him out, but she’s going to Maine before I’m due back. Maybe I should scrap the whole thing.”

  She was supposed to spend Christmas with her mother, her two sisters, and their husbands and children. All of the adults, she predicted, would devote the holidays to cross-examining her about why she wasn’t married and when she was going to get married, and the presence of her nieces and nephews would make her ask herself the same questions.

  “Hey,” said Hope, “I know it sounds like I’m drumming up business, but you could leave him with my sister. She has a sort of kennel. Pet-sitting service. She won’
t have a lot of room in the runs what with the holidays and everybody going away, but you could probably get her to keep him in the house.”

  “Is she around here?” Rita asked.

  “Haverhill? You know where that is? It’s only, like, forty-five minutes. You go straight up 93, and then you cut through North Andover, or else you get on 495. It’s not far, and it wouldn’t be like boarding him, really. She’s there practically all the time. He wouldn’t be alone. You want me to call her?”

  “Sure,” Rita said. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  Hope made the call, then Rita talked to the sister, who was named Charity. While Rita was on the phone, Hope said to me, “Oh, I meant to tell you. You know that dog, the other night? With the guy who rescued Kimi for you? Well, I was up at Charity’s the other day, and she’s got one there she’s boarding that looks a whole lot like that. The one she’s got is a bitch, and she’s smaller, a lot smaller, and also she’s lighter colored, but other than that, you’d swear they were littermates.”

  “Well,” I said, “there are a lot of shepherd mixes around. You know, probably what they are is mostly shepherd and yellow Lab.”

  Then Rita hung up the phone, and Hope gave her the directions to Charity’s. By the way, the third sister, Faith, died in infancy. Symbolic or what?

  6

  It takes more than sitting in the Garden and licking a Sport Bar to make a real Celtics fan, right? You have to know about Russell, Cousy, and Sam Jones. If you don’t recognize Robert’s rainbow jumper? If you don’t miss Danny’s three-pointers, Johnny Most’s gravel voice, and every game D.J. ever saved? If you think that French Lick, Indiana, is one more small town in the Midwest? Well, if that’s the case, you’re no more a real Celtics fan than Rita is a real dog person, or Kevin Dennehy, either. Kevin, who’s a good friend of mine as well as my next-door neighbor, had once owned a dog, and Rita had Groucho, of course, but there’s more to being a dog person than a mere history of ownership, and if there’s one never-fail way to rid yourself of nondoggy acquaintances, it’s to include them in a gathering of real dog people, which is to say, people who can discuss impacted anal sacs without gagging on their Brie.

  Before scheduling the party for that Sunday evening, I’d carefully and tactfully made sure that Rita and Kevin would have prior commitments. Then I’d invited them. Rita would be safely out of town, vacationing with her family, and Kevin would be at a tree-trimming given by his cousin Mickey De Franco, who makes a big deal of Christmas. Kevin is a Cambridge cop, and his cousin Mickey is a Boston cop. Kevin always points out that the correct generic term is police officer and that they’re both lieutenants and both in homicide, whereas cop suggests that they direct traffic or travel from school to school to deliver little lectures about looking both ways before you cross the street and, while you’re at it, not shooting up anything you wouldn’t want Santa Claus to find in your bloodstream, either. The problem, though, is that Kevin is built so much like a gorilla that, despite his red hair and blue eyes, he makes me feel like Dian Fossey. Consequently, Kevin looks nothing at all like an officer or a lieutenant and everything like what he really is: a good Cambridge cop.

  As I was saying, even if Rita had been in town, Kevin had been free, and both had accepted my invitation, they’d have had a rotten time. Besides, it was the annual holiday get-together of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, and neither of them is a member. In fact, the party wasn’t really mine. All I did was volunteer my place. It isn’t very big, but it’s so sparsely furnished that it will accommodate quite a few people, at least if they’re willing to stand or to sit on the floor. My Christmas tree was already up and decorated. All I had to do was clear the kitchen table for the potluck dishes everyone was bringing, set up a little bar on the counter, and pile a lot of birch logs in the fireplace. Then I carried a big box up from the basement, and unpacked, cleaned, and stuck red candles in all of the glass, silver, and pewter candle holders and ornate, multitiered candelabra won by my mother’s dogs and mine.

  About ten minutes before people were due to arrive—no dogs invited—I put Rowdy and Kimi in my bedroom, distributed the candles here and there, lit them, got the fire going, and started to worry. Rita once pointed out to me that my two worst preparty fears, that no one will come and that there won’t be enough to eat, are mutually exclusive, but before this party, I also worried about whether the three non-club-member guests I’d invited would fit in all right. I’d promised Steve, who was still away at the conference, to do what I could to welcome the Miners, but a veterinarian and his wife aren’t necessarily dog people. And John, Kimi’s savior? I hardly knew him.

  As it turned out, so many people showed up that my apartment was crammed full: Roz and Vince, our instructors, and Diane D’Amato, Ron Coughlin, Arlene, Liz, the Metcalfs, Hope, and all the other present and lots of the past board members, and thirty or forty other people. Everyone who’d promised food brought it. Maybe I should have tried to coordinate the menu beforehand. Real dog people have a lot of things in common, of course, but ethnic background isn’t one of them. The spread on the table included a baked ham, a deep-dish casserole version of potato latkes, a bowl of hummus, a platter of tomato and goat cheese salad, a pan of lasagna, a molded cranberry and Jell-O salad, and a big mound of Chinese-style chicken wings.

  And I needn’t have worried about John and the Miners. John never turned up at the party, and Jackie and Lee fit in fine. Not ten minutes after the Miners arrived, Jackie was popping hors d’oeuvres into her mouth and chatting with Diane D’Amato about stool samples, whipworm, and hot spots; and Lee was happily trading anecdotes with the Metcalfs about bitches in season and testicles that failed to drop. In other words, the party was a success right from the beginning, and once the other guests found out that Lee had worked for Oscar Patterson, I modestly scored it in the mid-190’s on a scale that runs from 0 to 200. Mystified by the numbers? You don’t show dogs in obedience, do you?

  Actually, the party was more like the breed ring than like obedience. Breed is conformation, right? How well each dog conforms to the standard? But there’s more than that to winning in breed. In addition to structural soundness, a good gait, and all the rest, a first-rate show dog has a big, attention-grabbing personality that tells the judge, “Hey! Look at me! Me! Me! Me! Hey, I’m the best! Put me up! Me! Me!” Rowdy, right? So I’m not insulting Jackie Miner, who occupied the center of the couch in the packed living room.

  Jackie had on red high heels and a silky red dress trimmed with a myriad of tiny red-ribbon bows. Her eyes were keen, her expression was alert, and her black curls glistened so brightly that I assumed that she’d just left the groomer’s. “Oscar was a very, very dramatic person, self-dramatizing, if you want to know the truth,” she told Arlene, who was curled up on the hearth directly in front of the fire, where she blocked everyone’s view of the flaming birch logs and hogged all the warmth. Sometimes I worry about Arlene. Heat-seeking can be a sign of a thyroid problem, especially in an individual who’s overweight and has a dull, patchy coat or, in her case, lank, thin hair.

  “Well, he was a poet,” Arlene said.

  “Yes, but that’s certainly not how he earned his living,” said Jackie. “He certainly didn’t support himself and Geri by writing poetry. Did he, Lee? Lee! I’m saying that Oscar’s poetry was really a hobby. He didn’t actually make his living from it. Isn’t that right?”

  Lee Miner and Ray Metcalf were by the Christmas tree, admiring some of the ornaments, I imagine. Tinsel can foul up a dog’s digestive tract—it’s as dangerous as panty hose—and glass balls look too much like toys to be safe on low branches. Candy canes and popcorn get eaten, and electric cords are hazardous if you have a chewer like Kimi. Of course, I never pile presents under the tree unless I’m pretty sure that I know what’s in them and that it isn’t chocolate, which is toxic to dogs, or homemade jelly in breakable jars, or anything else edible, either. The dogs may survive, but it’s hard to write a sincere-sounding thank-you note when th
e present you actually received was a tatter of damp wrapping paper and some drool-sodden crumbs. But, I should add, my tree was far from barren, displaying as it did a rather large collection of small gold- and silver-plated retrievers engraved with the words “Puppy’s First Christmas” and eight or ten mock-crystal sled dogs, as well as some ordinary Santas, angels, ribbons, and doves, all of which Lee Miner was fingering.

  As I was saying, Lee had good reason to admire the tree, and when Jackie interrupted him to ask whether Oscar Patterson’s poetry was a hobby, he looked toward her and said blandly, “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “You see?” she said. “It was really part of Oscar’s persona!” She studied our faces to see whether we understood the word. “His image,” she added unnecessarily. “Like being in the country. Oscar loved to go on about smelling the country and tasting it and feeling it. He could get sort of disgusting about it, if you ask me. He was always talking about smelling and tasting everything.”

  “California,” someone said.

  “As a matter of fact, he came from the Bronx.” Jackie’s tone suggested that she’d just explained everything about Oscar Patterson. For all I knew, she had. Is the Bronx a sensuous borough? I don’t know New York well at all. “And,” Jackie went on, rubbing one of the little bows on her dress, “he grew up in dire poverty. His father deserted the family, and his mother ran around with men!” Jackie paused, then continued. “And she drank, too. Oscar was obviously starved for affection, if you ask me.” Her voice dropped. “You could tell because he was always hugging and kissing everyone and putting his hands on people.” She crossed her left knee over the right, flexed the arch of the extended foot, and examined either her ankle or her red high-heeled pump.